Diller Scofidio and Renfro’s Exit opens in Sydney

An immersive installation exploring how human displacement is impacted by political, economic and environmental factors has opened at UNSW in Sydney.

The globally acclaimed exhibition, entitled Exit, visualizes complex data and statistics to reveal how global populations today are more unstable than any previous time in world history.

Designed by USA-based architecture firm Diller Scofidio and Renfro (DS+R) and based on an idea by French philosopher and urbanist Paul Virilio, the video installation quantifies and interprets the impact of urbanization, economic displacement, political disruption, climate change, natural disasters and deforestation on global human migratory trends.

The exhibition features a 360-degree animated global map that displays and interprets more than 100 data sources from world-leading organizations such as UNESCO and the World Bank. Viewers are placed at the centre of the exhibition while the animated globe rotates around them, displaying maps, texts and trajectories that visualize the startling findings of the data.

EXIT (installation view at UNSW Galleries), 2008–15. Collection Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris © Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Mark Hansen, Laura Kurgan and Ben Rubin, in collaboration with Robert Gerard Pietrusko and Stewart Smith.

EXIT (installation view at UNSW Galleries), 2008–15. Collection Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris © Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Mark Hansen, Laura Kurgan and Ben Rubin, in collaboration with Robert Gerard Pietrusko and Stewart Smith.

Image: silversalt

The exhibition, first shown in 2008, now includes more recent data added in 2015. The Australian premiere of the exhibition – currently on at UNSW Galleries as part of the Sydney Festival – is a timely reflection on the current asylum crisis playing out around the world.

The experimental project was created by DS+R with architect-artist Laura Kurgan, statistician-artist Mark Hensen and artist-designer Ben Rubin in collaboration with Robert Gerard Pietrusko and Stewart Smith. The exhibition is divided into six narratives: Sending Money Home, Political Refugees and Forced Migration, Natural Disasters, Rising Seas and Sinking Cities, and Speechless and Deforestation.

Exit was initially commissioned by Parisian organization Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain for a 2008 exhibition entitled Native Land, Stop Eject. Data sources were updated in time for a November 2015 installation inside the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, which coincided with the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP21).

The Australian premiere of Exit is presented by UNSW Galleries as part of the Sydney Festival, with support from major sponsor the City of Sydney.

Exit runs at UNSW Galleries, Oxford St and Greens Rd, Paddington NSW from 7 January to 25 March 2017.

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